Jessie’s in full bloom as Wild Rose . . .
TALK about a star is born! There was a frenzied bidding war in Toronto this week for a movie starring Jessie Buckley as a Glaswegian mother of two who has country music in her soul.
Buckley plays Rose-Lynn, a young woman just released from a year in jail for a drugs offence, who dreams, improbably, of singing in Nashville.
As directed by Tom Harper (who cast the Irish actress in War & Peace for the BBC) and with a script by Nicole Taylor, Wild Rose is a powerful drama driven by women — Julie Walters appears as Rose-Lynn’s mother and Sophie Okonedo plays a wealthy local woman who recognises the would-be singer’s potential.
‘She’s got all the wolves inside her running at 900 mph, but she doesn’t know how to steer the wolves,’ Buckley said of her character’s inner turmoil when we met at the Fairmont Hotel in Toronto. ‘ She feels she’s not entitled to go for success because of the prison of her life.’
Rose- Lynn has a destructive personality and doesn’t know how to get out of her own way.
‘ Singing is the only way she can harness those feelings,’ Jessie explained.
It’s a breakthrough performance for Buckley, in a searing role — like a bolt of lightning hitting the screen — and it’s going to catapult the 29- year- old to major stardom.
Jessie grew up ‘at the foot of a mountain’ in Killarney, Co Kerry, surrounded by music and a love of the arts. She remembers, as a toddler, accompanying her mother, Marina, to London when she was training to be an opera singer. ‘I would go with my mum to these classes. I would be at the back, in my nappy, having a dance.’
Her father, Tim, wrote poetry and stories. ‘I always felt at home telling stories,’ Jessie says. ‘Probably more so than living my own life. I’m much better in other people’s shoes than being myself.’
Before being cast in Wild Rose she had never been into country music.
‘I thought it was a bit hick, but it has got inside my heart,’ she said, noting that she and screenwriter Taylor wrote several of the songs featured in the film, and that an album will go on sale when the picture is released early in 2019 (though audiences can catch it at the BFI London Film Festival next month).
‘ You get an electric fireball of feeling listening to country. RoseLynn talks about country being “three chords and the truth”. Country music is of the people; and Rose-Lynn is of the people, too,’ Buckley told me.
Director Harper catches an authenticity about RoseLynn; and Glasgow’s working-class Priesthill district is a character in itself.
Wild Rose won rave notices from critics in Toronto, where NEON snapped up the picture’s American distribution rights. Buckley delighted festivalgoers when she sang some numbers from the film at an outside concert.
She is already a star in the UK, thanks to TV roles in The Woman In White, Taboo and War & Peace, and created an indelible impression on 2008 talent show I’ll Do Anything.
Cameron Mackintosh has long been a fan, and he and Working Title producer Tim Bevan might want to look at her to play Nancy in a new screen version of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, which has been a long time in development. And while I’m on the subject, wouldn’t Eddie Redmayne be brilliant as Fagin?
In the meantime, though, Buckley has graduated to the international star she was born to be.